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“Kefi”

Occasion:	Cuisine:	Area:	Cost:	Rating:
Night Out	Greek	Upper West Side	Moderate	Good

Lunzaul tequila with pear and cinnamon ($9). There’s also a nice beer list including Mythos, which brought back some fond memories.

Last week, I headed up to Kefi for a final dinner with my food writing students. As I passed the hostess station on the way down downstairs to a large circular table near the stairs, I heard her inform a table of walk-ins that there was a 45 minute wait. This was at 7pm on a Thursday night. The restaurant, which seats about 200, has topped 700 covers on some Saturday nights. Clearly, Psilakis and Arpaia know what their customers want, and it’s wonderful to see a restaurant thriving in this economy. I was thrilled. I was also happy about most of the food.

Starting out with the selection of spreads is always a good idea at any Greek restaurant. Here, the selection of spreads ($9.95, enough to share with a table of four) includes a tzatziki (a cool creamy yogurt, garlic, dill sauce), taramosalata (the classic fish roe spread), melintzanosalata (a smoky and spicy eggplant puree) and revithia (a thick and tangy chickpea and red pepper dip), served with warm pita bread fresh from the grill. This made me laugh. Not once in my two weeks in Greece was I ever served pita bread. I guess this was my misconception that pita was a Greek thing, but rather than round puffs of flat bread we were served hearty, grainy loafs of sunflower seed bread, often served grilled. While I would have welcomed the sunflower loaf, I love the pita at Kefi—it’s soft, warm and pocketless and is a lot less filling than the sunflower bread. And for me it makes the perfect edible shovel for the dips. And you can be sure, there was shoveling.

The warm feta is another appetizer suitable for these pliable pita shovels, a sort of Greek fondue of feta crowned with charred cherry tomatoes (sweet enough that I’d even put them in a pie topped with vanilla ice cream), olives, capers, anchovy and peppers ($6.95). Pile it all on your pita platform and have a bite. It’s like a Greek salad turned into Mom’s comfort food, and it’s a welcome alternative, especially on a cold night.

It is often said that the way to test a chef’s true skill is to have her roast a chicken. In Greece, that test would involve octopus, not poultry, and Psilakis would pass with straight As. His octopus ($9.95), a hefty, rather gnarly tentacle served straight off the grill in a curl on a bed of chic ... [more, click below]

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Posted: April 5, 2009

Other restaurants in Upper West Side :
+ 'Cesca   + Asiate   + Blue Hill Stone Barns   + Per Se   + The Neptune Room   + Spigolo   + Telepan   + Aix Brasserie   + 'Cesca   + Bar Boulud   + Dovetail   + BarBao   + Dinosaur Bar-be-Que   + Kefi   + Bar Luna   + Ed's Chowder House   + Red Rooster, by Rachel Barbarotta   + Loi by Dara Pollak   

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